All You Have to Do Is Click Your Beak Together Three Times

This week I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was a true phenomenon when it came out in 1970, but I've talked to some friends about it and I'm quite surprised how few of them know the book. To me it's almost a culmination of the national attitudes in the air between 1965 and 1975, a Free to Be...You and Me nominally for grownups, but it seems to have vanished from cultural memory.

In my opinion, this is A-OK, because Jonathan Livingston Seagull is an extremely silly book. I'm being dismissive, and (without walking that opinion back) I apologize, because I'm genuinely glad that so many people found solace in it during the early 70s. But if they needed self-actualization lessons in the form of seagulls who want to fly for the pleasure of it, maybe they should have tried yoga instead. Just a thought.

The book preaches that freedom (and evidently the ability to teleport?) is within us all the time, and we don't need to go looking for it. It's also quite short. I read it in probably half an hour, and you could too, if you want to understand a bit about the pre-Watergate years in this country. I am endlessly fascinated by the way America moved and thought and danced and wept and consumed during the twentieth century, so I'm not a bit sorry I read it, but I wouldn't necessarily say it was a book to change your life if you're a resident of the twenty-first.

Apparently we got a halfway decent Neil Diamond album out of it, so...um...

I also read Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino, which was far better. I'm two for three on Calvino now, but the ones I've liked I wish I'd written. I do not wish I'd written JLS, but I sort of wish I could capture a cultural mood like that book did, if only to enjoy building a house in Bermuda with the proceeds.

The $128,000 Answer

Following up on the last post: I watched Dark Victory, and Bette Davis was plenty clipped. I win. Depressing (but redemptive, I think) movie, very melodramatic, and the usual gang of Warner Bros.' DVD film experts gathered on a featurette to talk about why Dark Victory stands next to the rest of 1939's (stunning, never-equaled) crop of movies. They were wrong, but it was a valiant effort.

Following up on the prior post: I remembered an interesting secondhand story the other day that ties in to my point. A friend of mine - much older - told me about this time in the 1970s when he was in film class, and his professor asked him what his favorite movie was. He answered Wild Strawberries, an Ingmar Bergman film. Perfectly respectable answer for someone getting an advanced film degree. The professor proceeded to ask my friend the name of the last movie he'd seen in the theater. Star Wars, of course, was the answer. The professor noted that there was a small theater around the corner doing a Bergman retrospective, and that as the professor recalled, Wild Strawberries was part of the bill. Had my friend gone to see Wild Strawberries during this special event? No, he'd seen Star Wars again, instead, probably for the fourth or fifth time. Why did he choose to see Star Wars instead of his nominal favorite movie, the challenging and beautiful Wild Strawberries? Well, that, my friends, is the $64,000 question.

It's the same thing, why I've been watching MST3K on Matt's iPad over the last couple of days rather than writing or watching movies that are more worth my while. I love MST3K. It fills my heart up. It's not as respectable as Bergman, and it's perhaps not as stimulating. But I love it and it makes me happy.

All week I've been nosing through my notes book looking for my next project. There's at least one short story I think I'm ready to write, a literary one, but I'm not sure it's going to come out right. That's no reason not to write it anyway, but it's surely a reason to mentally whine and bang my self-pity drum.

Yeah, well, what legitimate reason did YOU ever have
to feel sorry for yourself, Keller? 

Money-work is nearly as dry as a desert, so the thing to do is write. I even have ideas for essays. There's no reason not to begin, and yet off I go to do laundry instead.

For the Honor of Grayskull

Last week I went to a fascinating lecture given by a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend (of-a-friend? Facebook connections, you know, weird and tenuous) in San Marino, on the grounds of the Huntington Library. I could talk about the Huntington for hundreds of words; it was so beautiful and interesting that I took Matt back the very next day and became a member to boot. But I want to talk about the lecture, instead. It regarded women writers in early pulp magazines, and the project this gentleman, Patrick B. Sharp of CSULA, is doing to preserve these early pulps (pre-1945). From where I live to the Huntington is about 45 minutes' drive with no traffic (and boy, is San Marino a completely different universe than the part of L.A. where I reside), but I decided I had to go anyway because, after all, I've just finished writing a book that has a female hero and no small connection to pulp.

Although women had a somewhat hard time getting published in genre fiction (then as now), there were a nonzero number of them writing, and Dr. Sharp discussed some of the stories they'd published. A few howlers appeared, including a weirdly constructed penis-vagina creature that kind of subsumed an astronaut who had to be saved by another, stronger dude. Stuff like that. In all I found it terrifically interesting context for what went on in sci-fi movies of the 50s and what still goes on in genre magazines and anthologies today.

Backstage at Clarkesworld

Spectacular Spectacular

When I found out that they were re-releasing Titanic this spring to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking, I instantly thought this was the most heartless, transparently cash-in-y thing I'd ever heard of. And immediately afterward, thought "I can't wait to see it BIG again."

Last weekend, I did. I saw it big, in 3D, and oh good glory, it was the best thing I've seen this year.

For starters, I forgot that Cameron does not take the tragedy of the sinking lightly. I'm not denying that there's something inherently squicky about cha-CHINGing the anniversary of 1,500 deaths, but his camerawork under the ocean, and the words he puts in Old Rose's mouth, are not cheap or trashy, nor are they the smallest part of the experience.

For two, I feel sad that Titanic has become a big ol' joke. I get mad when people don't take pop culture seriously, or when they take Art so seriously that absurdity and fun can't be appreciated. Pop culture is important. It's the place most of us live most of the time, and it's how an alien species or an anthropologist could have any hope of understanding us, of reaching us. These are the things that shape our lives: not just the noble ideals and and masterpieces of great thinkers and artists of the past, but the dialogue in Back to the Future and the music of Madonna.

Point is, a movie like Gone with the Wind, a big epic spectacle, sticks with the culture for decades on end. Whole generations watch it and then show it to their kids, who show it to their kids. People have a place in their hearts for that movie that they feel belongs just to them - but it belongs to everybody, because that's how great pop art feels: ubiquitous and unique. Titanic (despite its weaker script) sits easily on the shelf next to Gone with the Wind, and a critic who fails to see that simply doesn't have the long view.

There were long minutes during the sinking sequence when my mouth didn't close at all. I know this movie pretty durn well; I saw it in the theater three times (my moviegoing companion over the weekend had seen it eight times in '97-'98), and I used to put it on the DVD player in my laptop while I knitted in my little room in Massachusetts. No single line is a surprise, although I don't have most of it by heart as I do GWTW. But it was still completely different on the big screen, just as GWTW had been when I saw it on a rerelease in the mid-90s. (I will never forget that day. It was an irreplaceable experience to see it on a theater-sized screen. I badly want it to go back in the theater again.) It was still all of the best of any moviegoing experience compressed into a paltry three hours and fourteen minutes. We go to the cinema to see something spectacular, that is our only goal, I firmly believe. And that is exactly what Titanic is, no more and no less.

This time around I gave some more thought to the way Cameron writes female characters. I think he tends to veer away from the standard male gaze in ways that I enormously admire, although I don't know if his motivation is because he's a feminist or because he just wants as big an audience as possible. Rose (and all this goes for Sarah Connor in T2, and Ripley in Aliens) is objectified to some extent, but I really want to be her, the same way men want to be Philip Marlowe. She's fully realized, not sketched. She doesn't just behave the way you want her to, acquiesce and trot along with the motion of the plot, but actually follows her own lights and helps to drive it all forward. This is not the way most female characters behave in Hollywood.

There are sexist aspects to Titanic, but they match the period of the piece. If anything, it's anachronistically unsexist in many spots. And it's not perfect, you know, there's a lot of Men Stuff that goes on, but never does it seem (to me) inherently more important than the bedroom drama between Rose and the expectations placed upon her. Which is sort of the whole dynamic between Men Stuff and Lady Stuff in fiction, the boardroom vs. the bedroom, and one of them being necessarily more interesting because it's populated by the masters of the universe. Footnoted to A Room of One's Own.

I could be giving credit to Cameron where it's not due, but I find that, over and over in his oeuvre, he does not falter or dick-swing when he writes female characters, and I really believe Titanic is no exception. Even if Rose does require saving, according to herself. She's just a teenager, after all.

So, upshot: Go see it, if you missed it the first time around, or even if you didn't. Even if you hated it. Try it on for size. It's big enough to fit most everybody.

Married to the Martyr

A few weeks back, I went to a midnight screening of the fourth Twilight film with a friend of mine. I'm not much of a Twi-hard, because I think the books are pretty godawful and the universe is pretty problematic. (Not getting into that right now, Dracula-type fans.) But I find it an interesting cultural artifact, I enjoy some of the laughably terrible dialogue and presentation, and I'm a complete sucker for the appealing way [certain aspects of] sex and romance are presented in the movies.

Breaking Dawn: Part 1 troubled me in a way the rest of the movies didn't. When I got over my midnight-movie hangover, I wrote an essay explaining why. I sent it to Slate (for Double X) and to Salon, but neither one of them was interested, so instead the whole internet gets it for free. Enjoy.